Masked Discourse: Dramatic Representation and Generic Transformation in Wole Soyinka's A Dance of the Forests

Abstract

The criticism of African drama began as an imported discourse? As such, it lacked an adequate vocabulary of descriptive, analytical, and conceptual tools to account for the traditional plays and performances that serve as the primary generic base for contemporary drama in Africa and, in some instances, the African diaspora. From the very beginning, therefore, African dramatic criticism has depended on a hodgepodge of concepts from European models and other concepts and analytical tools from the disciplines of (colonial) anthropology and (early post-independence) sociology, which more often than not missed the point because they ignored the dramatic conventions and structural forms of the indigenous dramatic genres of theatre practice.